Spotify has changed its payment structure such that playing most tracks they host will result in a $0 payout to the artist. That’s because they’ll now require a song to have at least 1000 streams a year in order to be paid out on.
To be clear, the claim is not that Spotify will keep the money themselves (not that they’re against that concept in general), but rather it’ll just get redistributed into payments for more popular tracks. Nonetheless, whether you think this is a good or bad move it’s interesting to learn a bit most about the makeup of the Spotify catalogue.
From NME:
According to Spotify data, there are around 100 million songs on the service, yet only around 37.5million meet the new requirements to generate revenue.
…
Spotify said that 99.5 per cent of all streams on the platform “are of tracks that have above 1,000 streams.”
It’s a real “winner takes all” situation. And darkly amusing to learn that one of the non-malicious reasons they’re doing this is that, because they anyway pay so badly, artists with those kinds of listening numbers were in practical terms not receiving any payment even under the former regime.
On average a song that got under 1000 streams over the past year earned a whopping $0.03 per month. And not even that 3 cents made it to the place you probably thought it did given the minimum withdrawals and transaction fees that the non-Spotify institutions like to apply. And that’s even before we consider the fact that, as we covered before, most money that does eventually get out of the system goes to somewhere other than the artist’s bank account for reasons of varying legitimacy.